Business with dictatorships must stop as soon as possible. In fact it should be forbidden. Nothing good comes out of that. I hope we will see more moves like this from democratic governments.
The western companies aren't using the business as a strategic tool to destabilise the host country. While nationalising something like an oil company is only about changing where profits are sent.
What is your source for this claim? Wouldn't companies destabilize the host country to facilitate their own business?
Western companies have been destabilizing local regimes for centuries at this point. Companies in general are a convenient way to mask state power that pays for itself. Many of these companies were established in former colonies as a direct replacement for explicitly colonial resource extraction.
Searching online for examples I find Glencore, TotalEnergies, ExxonMobil, Chevron (among others) have all recently engaged in bribery or even supported violent political groups abroad to protect their own interests.
where did you get that info? from cartoons? how old re you little npc?
The Dutch taking ownership of this company is not to divert its profits, it's to prevent the weaponisation of the company against the host country. There is an expectation that the Dutch have reasonable evidence of this. It's also set against a background of the foreign country's other attempts of unprovoked interference.
The replies seem to miss the mark and provide examples where nefarious activities were engaged in the pursuit of profit, some other examples provided were further off the mark by citing examples of retaliation against nationalisation (which is the opposite situation).
This is why I state that they're difficult to compare. If the Dutch were claiming this company for a financial motive it would be the source of significant uncertainty in foreign investment. That doesn't seem to be the case here.
I mean where would the West be if it wouldn't do exactly that in Africa, Southern America and surely other places (and did it in even more extreme ways, back when people didn't care that much).
ex. cocoa production in Africa, with European companies being the ones doing and profiting from it.
Do western governments use other methods to destabilise the host countries? What should be done about those?
The 2004 book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins makes the US has.
It explores how western companies use the the Investor–state dispute settlement system to usurp the will of countries to control their own resources. ICC (International Chamber of Commerce in Switzerland) and the World Bank (via ICSID) are the main arbitration venues for this corporate bullying/neocolonialism.
Then of course, as soon as that arbitration is ignored/won then the genocidal defenders of democracy are activated.
If you pull the thread on many conflicts, at some point you will find these courts.
I'm not a fan of the Chinese government but I hope the Chinese firms/people involved use these same systems against the Dutch government.
One might argue that global connection through economic ties is what gave us thes last 50 years of relative peace. So even with talent/ip drain there's a solid humanitarian and cosmopolitan argument here that trade is just good for humanity even when "unfair".
I'm not saying thats the case here but I would not dismiss this as "nothing good comes out of that"
The past fifty years may just be an exceptional footnote. Fifty years is not a significant period of time and the peace we have endured has not been evenly distributed (nor does it appear to be stable).
But this is total childish nonsense. We gained 75 years of peace in Europe not because the war was terrible, but because the entire world was divided between the USA and the USSR. And, as it happened, these two countries decided not to fight each other in a full-scale war.
The reason we gained 75 years of peace is because France and Germany decided to form an alliance to prevent further conflict (considering they had just fought 2 wars in the space of 40 years), and, as a secondary goal, to reduce dependence on the US (de Gaulle being especially eager), starting with the Treaty of Rome, and evolving into the EU.
There have been no wars in Europe for 75 years because for those 75 years the United States single-handedly decided with whom Europe would start wars.
Western countries aren't allowed to freely buy companies in western countries either.
> Business with dictatorships must stop as soon as possible.
Why? Business is business.
> Nothing good comes out of that.
What nonsense. You should check the wealth generation the past few decades. Had to take you seriously when you espouse such nonsense.
> I hope we will see more moves like this from democratic governments.
You seem to have a bizarre and naive notion that this is a "democracy" issue. If china was a democracy, we'd have the exact same problem. Heck, you could make an argument that a democratic china would be far more aggressive it would be subject to populism. Russia is a democracy and it is fighting a war with another democracy. Most of the conflicts around the world are between democracies actually. I know the democracies you don't like, you just conveniently label "dictatorships". But saying so doesn't make it so.
The problem isn't democracy vs autocracy. It's a matter of power. White vs non-white. It's the fight over 500 years of established geopolitical order. It's why the fight isn't between the US and china. It's between "the west" and china.
So you see, such businesses have been quite fruitful for the resources the West has gulped over the years.
And on that front, the rivalry with China is actively stoked. They’ve been a top trading partner. We could have a relationship based on cooperation not rivalry but our leaders are incompetent and adversarial. Still you have some US consumers who seem to want higher prices for themselves. At the end of the day it’s the defense lobby who will be profiting from chauvinism.